My Everest…

Back to the surgeon I go; after many x rays and tests he says everything is fine with the fusion. As I immediately got back on the highest dose of gabapentin,  I have ever been on. Here we go again.    Back to physio. My kind and understanding physio’s !  Tests, trials, take home exercises……..FLARE UPs!! Next week lets try this —nope, and this?  Nope? We tried so many things to no avail.  I read so many books on Pain. I even read all the books the Physio’s had on Pain Management and it had consumed me.   But what the heck is with the flare ups and why do they hang around forever?  During this time of trial and error I was off work again.  I went to an EMG appointment, the Dr that I saw had done an EMG on me a few years earlier so he had a baseline test to look at. He actually apologized and said I’m sorry that we didn’t catch this earlier. It might not have been as bad as it is now. Too little too late !  

I need to address the flare ups. They are great fun (insert loads of sarcasm).  So for my body not to flare, I needed to take care and not poke the bear!  My favourite physio told me this and to this day I find humour in “poke the bear” . I can see my brain as the bear with its fangs bared just waiting to lash out at what it viewed as the smallest disagreeable movement.  Keystrokes on a keyboard, cutting food in the kitchen, folding laundry, pulling a theraband the slightest distance away from my body, and I was down for possibly hours, or it could be days.  Weird eh?  I needed and still need to, to this day, listen very closely to my body.  Was it hard, hell yes!  It still is but you can either sit on the couch and channel surf or choose to move a little everyday and pick yourself up and if you look at the little things they add up.  I joke about my flare ups with my chiro as he’s doing my adjustments to be careful or I might flare. Needless to say he’s not impressed when I do, but he knows I am ½ kidding and ½ serious because I did flare after an adjustment.  So it sticks in your mind.  I always need to be watchful of the bear. He’s always there as the overprotective security guard to my broken alarm system. Read on, you’ll get my meaning.

Photo Credits (Featured Photo): Brett Jordan on Unsplash